Editor:
This time we’re talking with Ramon Ray, a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and best-selling author who has launched five companies and sold three. He publishes ZoneofGenius.com and wrote The Celebrity CEO to help small business owners build their brands. With global speaking experience and collaborations with major brands, he focuses on helping entrepreneurs and small businesses gain visibility, credibility, and community. Ramon, it is great to meet you.
Ramon Ray:
It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on this amazing podcast, Internet Marketing Newsletter. Glad to be here and serve your audience. Anytime I can help small business owners or entrepreneurs or anybody in between, it’s always a fun day for me. So, thank you for having me.
Editor:
Oh, it’s lovely to have you. And now you, as I say, have founded five companies. You’ve successfully exited three. What would you say are the biggest lessons, the biggest experiences that you’ve gained from that in building and growing your own businesses?
Ramon Ray:
Sure. And for my journey, it’s not been the billion dollar, even hundreds of millions of dollars of exits that we may read in headlines on Bloomberg or CNBC or BBC, depending on where you’re at. But mine have been in no shame full embracing it, a few hundred thousand dollars. And some people may, “Wow, Ramon, maybe that’s not a lot,” but when you think about it, that’s still the top 1%, maybe even of the 1% in the U.S. context, 30 million businesses and I’m sure several million more globally.
So, my point is, the biggest lesson learned is really the power of relationships and connectivity.
Recently I was appointed as the Bitdefender Small Business Ambassador. Bitdefender is an amazing company that helps small businesses stay secure. That was due to relationships.
Or I think about me being on stage with Daymond John, Jason Feifer, Von Trapp, or other name-dropping intentionally.
My point to answer your question, the biggest lesson learned was at the level I’m at, at large, part is about relationships. You can do Alex Hormozi, and I love what he did to those who don’t know the reference, but spend quite a bit on Facebook ads and build up credibility.
But for me, listen, you build good relationships, do good to people, build something of value, then you have the right to proactively say, “Hey, does somebody want to buy it from me?”
And/or organically somebody will see it and say, “Hey, would you like to sell that?” So that’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned, the power of relationships, not-withstanding the things we can get into of scalability and processes and systems and all of those things, but relationships is the biggest thing I can think of.
Editor:
Well, Ramon, how did your journey start? How did you enter this world in the first place?
Ramon Ray:
Well, that’s a great question, but I spent some years moving forward from being a child and all those kinds of things. But my professional career, I got one of my first jobs at the United Nations. It wasn’t my first one, but one of my first jobs at the United Nations.
And while there, was the cusp of this current.com era. There was the steam engine era. I’m sure there was a guy there were like, “Ooh, we have steam.” And he got into steam engines or there was the gal who fabrics. I was a little after that. But this was the cusp of this current season of.com. Now we’re in this, there was the AI season, which we’re in, you have apps and mobility.
I was the seasons of computer technology and modems and networking and Wi-Fi and Intel was at its primacy or primacy. So that’s where I got in just context, AOL, CompuServe, America, all this blogging before it was called blogging.
And that gave me the foothold to know how to install or repair computers and the updating software that come on a thumb drive or a floppy disc, and the beginnings of downloading the Mosaic browser, which is the precursor to Netscape, AltaVista before there was Google.
So that was the era I was in. I’m 50 plus years old, that was the era I was in. And from there, I parlayed that into being a motivational professional speaker.
Somebody just asked me, they saw me doing some things, “Ramon, what’s your fee to speak?” And then Inc. Magazine and BLACK ENTERPRISE, two prominent USA Magazines publications said, “Ramon, can you write for us?”
And that started again, the journey today of content monetization and being paid to speak. That was a compressed version of how I got to be who I am today.
Editor:
I love it. And of course, you are widely known and widely respected for the book, The Celebrity CEO. Maybe you could just perhaps explain for anybody whose perhaps not come across that, explain what you mean by that concept and also why it’s so important for small business owners.
Ramon Ray:
Yeah, one of my deep passions is of course, entrepreneurship. Having started a few companies, as you already said, sold a few. So I love entrepreneurship and scaling and hiring and the thrill of going into debt or not, or however you build it, but the risks, that excites me, it’s how I’m built. But yes, the core thing, one of my expertise is, because I’ve done it myself several times, is how do you build your personal brand? How do you take who you are, your face, your voice, how you show up, your smile, your credibility, how I interact with the radio or a podcast host or not? All these things becomes your brand. So that’s my specialty because I have several books. I do my podcasts, I have websites, I produce content. I’ve been on Fox Business and MSNBC and Associated Press and all these things. So how do you build your personal brand?
And three simple things I like to talk about is, one, is getting awareness for who you are. That’s important. If people don’t even know, oh, he has a solution for me, game over. So one is awareness. Awareness of that I have a problem to solve her problem. It’s all the same principle, awareness.
Number two is nurturing. What am I doing on a consistent basis to nurture that relationship, nurture that relationship, and/or to build trust?
And once I do that, sales will then follow.
So that’s the summary of it is to challenge all entrepreneurs, all small business owners. We have the opportunity to leverage the power of our personal brand to be more known. We don’t have to be hidden. We can leverage it as an asset in our business.
Editor:
I think that’s become way more obvious, hasn’t it, in more recent times? Obviously these days, everybody knows that Jeff Bezos is the owner of Amazon. You’ve got Richard Branson, who of course for many years has been the face of the Virgin brand. And a lot of people start businesses, but they want to almost hide behind the business.
But are you of the belief, Ramon, that people do business with people not with companies?
Ramon Ray:
Absolutely. You take a look at this short time we’ve been together, right, we had some banter, had some fun, had some laughter before we started? We connected and I realised that my voice of course is being heard today, but the point I’m making is that, yes, people work with people they know, like, and trust…
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